Inside the Nando’s restaurant that had once been the Lord Palmerston, Michaela Dennis stares at her date Wanda’s chips.

“Have one,” Wanda says, but Dennis is on the final day of her Lenten fast, and it is chips that she has put to one side. Stupid time to go on a date really, but Wanda Abalos was a match, and it’s been three weeks since she last heard from Jade. Abalos takes a paper napkin an begins folding it.

“My mum ran a restaurant back in the Philippines,” she says. “She taught me how to fold napkins into swans.”

And she begins turning and creasing the white tissue. Dennis wonders if her faith will be a deal breaker. Most people don’t care, as long as they don’t have to change. But some can be a bit defensive; Chloe called the church a bigoted, homophobic patriarchy run on money and rules; a toxic force of corruption. She only saw what she wanted, the greed and human rights abuses, paedophile priests and billionaire televangelists. She didn’t see the quiet ones picking up the pieces unnoticed; clearing up mess, mending the broken and praying in silence. Wanda Abalos continues folding, shaking her head.

“No, not like that.”

“Love the sinner, not the sin”, a kind priest had told her, embedding the belief that what she felt was sinful, as if she woke one day and chose to prefer girls over men.

“Come on.”

“God is OK if you stay celibate”, the priest told her, as if the Creator of the universe obsesses over how men and women climax, and with whom. The chips look delicious. Wanda utters a strange, frustrated grunt and Michaela Dennis wanders if Abalos is autistic. She doesn’t give a shit about swans, she just wants to connect.

“So, what are the people you work with like?”

Abalos shushes her with her hand.

“I’ve got this.”

The chips wait to be eaten and Dennis waits patiently for love, for Jesus to reassure her that God made her just as he wanted, and for a swan to emerge from a recycled paper napkin in a Kilburn chicken shop.

The clown looks in at the two women, one earnestly folding paper, the other watching; a bowl of uneaten chips between them. He has hundreds of pounds in his pockets but free food tastes sweeter, and so he walks in and strides up to the table.

“Have you finished with these?”

Wanda Abalos not looking up, her head still in the dining room at the Grand Garden Oriental in Manila.

“Sure, go ahead,” Dennis says.

The clown grabs a fistful and strides out, a female manager in pursuit.

“Excuse me?”

He turns, mouth full of fries.

“Excused.”

The food is still warm. It tastes of kindness.